Isosmosi was a collaboration between Mutant Squad and SPECTRE, created in the beginning of 2012 and staged during the 7th APTPI Annual International Educational Meeting in Milan. The performers on stage were linked with a system of ropes, connected to steel hooks pierced through their skin; constantly monitoring their EEG and using a custom projection mapping software, we were able to visualize their emotional feedback making their body (and the ropes between them) glow in sync with their brainwaves.

Recently on the OF forum there has been some interesting discussion about finding skeletons inside meshes.
Since I never really confronted with this kind of topic, I avidly read people’s code, opened my IDE and tried myself.

Here’s my first experiment: a puppet whose strings are controlled by a puppeteer named random. Looks painful…

This is a quick preview of the first beta of theTube, a visualist friendly tool (somewhat inspired by Jesus Gollonet) that grabs the stuff on your monitor and sends it to Syphon. The idea is that you may want to syphon into MadMapper, OF, Processing, Quartz, something that does not have a syphon-out (i.e. your browser, a videogame, etc…): just move theTube in front of the visuals you want grab, and you’re done.
It’s still very much beta and I’m not sure about what I’m going to do with it, but if you want to try it, you can grab a demo here.

I’ve really been uber busy recently, but wanted to share a couple quickies.

The first one comes from the recent past: as I said before, in december I attended Zach’s workshop @ Fabrica, one of the most incredible places an artist/creative/hacker/whatever can visit; it was a great time and gave me the opportunity to get my hands dirty with OF under the guide of one of its creators and to experiment inside a sort of vivarium full of talented people.Now a little resumé of the workshop has been published here, together with a video interview featuring both Zach and Neural‘s boss Alessandro Ludovico and a booklet with all the projects developed during the workshop.

from september 24th to october 11th, Liberty Hall, an iconic building located in centre of Dublin, was turned into a 50 metre, low resolution display, similar to the famous Blinkenlights project in Berlin: 330 windows, powered by energy efficient LED lights, became giant rgb pixels, ready to broadcast digital art across the city skyline. In order to provide the needed contents, a competition was held and I replied to the call for works. In those days I really had little time to start and develop a new piece of code, but , in the weeks before, I did play a little with metaballs and thought I could reuse some of those experiments: metaball algorithms scale nicely to every resolution, are easy to implement in the selected platform (Processing) and, most important, the idea of huge sticky balls, bouncing inside a 50 mt glass box in the middle of Dublin, just sounded fun. So I sat down and created the “World’s biggest lava lamp“.

… have been featured in the promo video for the next edition of IULM’s executive master in Digital Entertainment Media and Design:
You can notice I was having serious sleep disorder from my witchy haunted hair and my somewhat lost expression 🙂
What people at the university labeled with the word “INNOVAZIONE” (= innovation) in a bulgy, solid impact font, was a light, quick and dirty alternative to optical flow: tracking movement (ie: differences between 2 video frames) inside different sensible areas, I was trying to build little contrallable interface bits to be used in situations where lightness on the hardware was more important than precision (ie: old hardware, embedded, tiny parts of complex software, etc.).
[after the jump, another couple videos and some aftermath…](altro…)